Category Archives: Wage Slavery

Democrats who won this months mayoral elections should not declare their victories to be referendums for or against socialism or defunding the police two bogeymen that conservatives have tarred and feathered. These declarations by some Democratic candidates, including African Americans, have steadily gained traction since the election of President Biden and have intensified Republican attacks on critical race theory and voting rights. Given the fact that many Americans are still without adequate health care and paid family leave, and are continuously being victimized by the police, it is particularly unwise and politically nave for Democrats to be celebrating their victories as triumphs over liberalism or progressive politics.

What is needed instead is for Democratic public officials, at all levels, to develop a clear message to help everyday Americans realize that programs that expand the social safety net, such as the presidents Build Back Better Act, serve their needs better than the austerity measures and obsession with peripheral issues like CRT offered by Republicans. Adopting the attack points of the opposition party, though it may be helpful in the short term, will have disastrous consequences in the long term.

To be sure, all of the mayors who were elected or re-elected will be met with difficult times. But they need to govern in a serious manner and leave the defining of their victories to journalists and historians who cover and study local politics.

In the Atlanta mayoral election last week, all of the major candidates except one pledged to hire more police. Former Mayor Kasim Reed, who finished third in a race that attracted 14 candidates and who was endorsed by the police union, emphasized the need to provide more due process rights to police officers accused of wrongdoing. What a change from the historic protests we witnessed little more than a year ago when millions took to the streets and demanded justice and protection from police abuses after several high-profile killings of African Americans.

I do not believe that the slogan of defunding the police has utility in todays debate over police reform, and its meaning has been manipulated and made toxic by the opponents of progressive politics the same ones the Democratic moderates are following now. But as confusing as the slogan is, it represents a siren blaring out for reform and eradication of aggressive policing, not a call to leave communities defenseless from criminals, as detractors claimed. The deliberate obfuscation of police reform in the wake of a spike of violence led, for example, to the defeat of a Minneapolis ballot initiative to replace the police department with a department of public safety something some cities did nearly 50 years ago.

But the problem with the abandonment of serious efforts to reform policing and settle instead for simply hiring more police officers is that it does not change the structural problems or culture of policing. The importance of the DFP movement was that it called attention to the need to radically reform policing from its roots up and, in the South, disentangle it from its dodgy links to slavery. Recent commitments to train new officers and retrain current ones in what some have referred to as a post-George Floyd manner have yet to be fulfilled. Only time will determine the efficacy of this promise if it ever gets to the stage of implementation.

The recent string of moderate mayoral victories has also caused many to claim that the progressive calls for major structural changes across the country are out of touch with what the majority of the American people want. And although I doubt that this can be substantiated, it has devolved into efforts to curtail the need for radical reforms in general, such as Medicare for all, free public higher education and paid family leave. Most of these reforms have implications for local government, but none like that of police reform.

Its true that the fight for political victory is usually a fight to win the center. This is how we ended up with a President Biden instead of a President Sanders. Its why centrist candidates won in both Buffalo and New York City over both more conservative and more progressive ones. But there have been notable exceptions to this trend, such as in St. Louis, where progressive Mayor Tishaura Jones won in April.

The runoff race for mayor in Atlanta features the more conservative City Council President Felicia Moore against the more progressive citywide Councilman Andre Dickens. What happens in the Nov. 30 runoff in the cradle of the civil rights movement will say much about the state of Black politics in America and whether the links between those politics and progressive and grass-roots democracy have been weakened or broken altogether.

Whatever the outcome in Atlanta and elsewhere, the rush to find meaning in the recent victories by moderates is misguided and insulting to large swaths of progressive citizens who merely want to be safe in their communities, earn a living wage and enjoy the benefits of living in an advanced democracy. My advice as a long-time participant and student of local politics, someone who has seen the political trends ebb and flow, is for victorious candidates, if they have to say anything, to merely say this: Thank you for giving me the honor to serve as your leader. I will never betray your trust.

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The Misguided Urge to Declare Victory Over Progressive Ideas - Governing

When President Biden first unveiled the Build Back Better agenda, it appeared that this country was on the path to a new war on poverty. In April, he told Congress that trickle-down economics have never worked and that it was time to build the economy from the bottom-up. This came after the first reconciliation bill of the pandemic included the child tax credit that combined with an expanded Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program and unemployment benefits, stimulus checks, and other emergency programs reduced the poverty rate from 13.9% in 2018 to 7.7% in 2021. (Without such actions, it was estimated that the poverty rate might have risen to 23.1%.) All eyes are now on the future of this Build Back Better plan, whether it will pass and whether it will include paid sick leave, reduced prescription drug prices, expanded child tax credits, expanded earned income tax credits for those without children, universal pre-K, climate resilience and green jobs, and other important domestic policy investments.

For months, the nation has witnessed a debate taking place in Congress over how much to invest in this plan. What hasnt been discussed, however, is the cost of not investing (or not investing sufficiently) in health-care expansion, early childhood education, the care economy, paid sick leave, living-wage jobs, and the like. Similarly missing have been the voices of those affected, especially the 140 million poor and low-income people who have the most to lose if a bold bill is not passed. By now, the originally proposed 10-year, $3.5 trillion reconciliation bill, which a majority of Americans support, has been slowly chiseled down to half that size. For that you can largely thank two Democratic senators, West Virginias Joe Manchin and Arizonas Kyrsten Sinema, unanimously backed by Donald Trumps Republican Party, which would, of course, cut everything.

Because of them, the reconciliation process to pass such a bill has become so crucial and politically charged, given that the same obstructionist Democrats have continued to uphold the Senate filibuster. All year, Manchin, Sinema, and the Republicans have blocked action on urgent issues ranging from climate change and immigration reform to living wages and voting rights. For example, after months of resistance to the For the People Act, a bill that protects and expands voting rights, Manchin forced the Democrats to put forward a watered-down Freedom To Vote Act with the promise that he would get it passed. In late October, though, he failed to win a single Republican vote for the bill and so the largest assault on voting rights since the post-Civil War Reconstruction era continues, state by state, unabated.

President Bidens original Build Back Better plan was successfully caricatured as too big and expensive, even though it represented just 1.2% of gross domestic product over the next decade and Congress had just passed a bipartisan single-year Pentagon budget nearly double the annual cost of BBB. In reality, $3.5 trillion over a decade would be no more than a start on whats actually needed to rescue the economy, genuinely alleviating poverty and human suffering, while making real strides toward addressing the climate crisis. Instead, cuts to, and omissions from, the reconciliation bill will mean nearly two million fewer jobs per year and 37 million children prevented from getting needed aid, while leaving trillions of dollars raked in by the super rich in the pandemic moment untaxed. Perhaps it will also fall disastrously short when it comes to reducing greenhouse gas emissions to the level necessary on the timetable called for by the worlds scientific community.

Much of the recent coverage of these dynamics has focused on what all of this could mean for the Democrats in the 2022 elections (especially givenVirginia Democrat Terry McAuliffes loss in a state that President Biden won by 10 points). With low approval ratings, striking numbers of retiring members of Congress and increasingly gerrymandered voting maps, as well as outright voter-suppression laws, the Democratic faithful have reason to be worried. Still, whats missing from such discussions is how bad things already are for tens of millions of Americans and just how much worse they could get without far bolder government action. Its true that the 2022 elections could resemble the 2010 midterm elections when Republicans broke President Obamas grip on Congress, winning control of the House of Representatives, but too few observers are grappling with the possibility that 2022 could also reproduce conditions of a sort not experienced since the Great Recession.

As our second pandemic-winter approaches, there are many signs of an economy entering crisis. Economists are warning that despite an employment bump thanks to direct government intervention, we may already be entering a recession that could, sooner or later, prove at least as severe as the Great Recession of 2008. The expectations of everyday Americans certainly seem to reflect this simmering possibility. Consumer confidence has dropped to the second lowest level since 2011 and holiday spending among low-income Americans is expected to fall 22% from last year. (The 11.5% of all shoppers who say they wont spend anything at all on gifts or services this holiday is the highest in a decade.)

As has been true throughout the pandemic, millions of people abandoned by the government will do whatever they can to provide for themselves and their communities. They will try to care for one another, share what they have, and come together through mutual-aid networks. Their resources alone, however, are anything but adequate. Instead, as conditions potentially worsen, such survival struggles should be seen as beachheads when it comes to organizing a largely untapped base of people who need to be awakened politically if any kind of lasting change is to be realized. These millions of poor and low-income Americans will be critical in creating the kind of broad movement able to make, as Martin Luther King once put it, the power structure say yes when they really may be desirous of saying no.

The Greatest Threat or Our Best Hope?

Keep in mind that the survival struggles of the poor and dispossessed have long been both a spark and a cornerstone for social, political, and economic change in ways seldom grasped in this country. This was true in pre-Civil War America, when hundreds of thousands of enslaved people smuggled themselves to freedom on the Underground Railroad, forcing the nation to confront the horrors of slavery in person and igniting a movement to end it. It was no less true in the 1930s, when the hungry and out-of-work began organizing unemployment councils and tenant-farmer unions before President Franklin Roosevelt even launched the New Deal. The same could be said of the decades before the Civil Rights Movement, when Black communities began organizing themselves against lynch mobs and other forms of state-sanctioned (or state-complicit) violence.

Another example was the transformative work of the Black Panther Party, whose legacy still impacts our political life, even if the image of the party remains distorted by myths, misrepresentations, and racist fearmongering. This October marked the 55th anniversary of its founding. For many Americans, its enduring image is still of ominous looking men in black berets and leather jackets carrying guns. But most of their time was spent meeting the needs of their community and building a movement that could transform life for poor Black people.

In a recent interview, Fredericka Jones, a Black Panther herself and the widow of the partys co-founder, Huey Newton, explained that among their projects,

the most famous and most notable would be the free breakfast the Panthers offered to thousands of children in Oakland and other cities, providing basic nutrition for kids from poor families, long before the government took on this responsibility. We knew that children could not learn if they were hungry, but we also had free clinics. We had free clothing. We had a service called SAFE (Seniors Against a Fearful Environment) where we would escort seniors to the bank, or, you know, to do their grocery shopping. We had a free ambulance program in North Carolina. Black people were dying because the ambulance wouldnt even come and pick them up.

Before his murder in 1989, Newton himself characterized their work this way:

The Black Panther Party was doing what the government shouldve done. We were providing these basic survival programs, as we called them, for the Black community and oppressed communities, when the government wasnt doing it. The government refused to, so the community loved the Party. And that was not what you saw in the media. You didnt see brothers feeding kids. You saw a picture of a brother who was looking menacing with a gun.

As Newton pointed out, the Panthers bravely stepped into the void left by the government to feed, educate, and care for communities. But they were also clear that their survival programs were not just about meeting immediate needs. For one thing, they purposefully used those programs to highlight the failures of President Lyndon Johnsons War on Poverty and the contradictions between Americas staggering wealth and its staggering poverty and racism, which existed side by side and yet in separate universes. In those years, the Panthers quite consciously tried to shine a light on the grim paradox of a nation that claimed there was never enough money to fight poverty at home, even as it spent endless billions of dollars fighting a war on the poor in Southeast Asia.

Their programs also gave them a base of operations from which to organize new people into a human-rights movement, which meant that all of their community work would be interwoven with political education, highly visible protest, cultural organizing, and a commitment to sustaining leaders for the long haul. While deeply rooted in poor black urban communities, the Panthers both inspired and linked up to similar efforts by Latino and poor-white organizations.

These were, of course, the most treacherous of waters. At the time, J. Edgar Hoovers FBI listed the Black Panthers and their breakfast program as the greatest threat to internal security in the country. Government officials recognized that such organizing could potentially catch fire across far wider groups of poor Americans at a moment when the War on Poverty was being dismantled and the age of neoliberal economics was already on the rise. In such a context, the ability of the Panthers to put the abandonment of poor Black people under a spotlight, unite leaders within their community, and develop relationships with other poor people across racial lines seemed like a weapon potentially more powerful than the guns they carried.

I wrote recently about the often-overlooked successes of the National Union of the Homeless, which organized tens of thousands of homeless people across the country in the 1980s and 1990s. Its success came, in part, through lessons its leaders drew from the experiences of the Panthers, something they acknowledged at the time. In fact, they called the key strategic ingredients for their work the Six Panther Ps (program, protest, projects of survival, publicity work, political education, and plans, not personalities), organizing building blocks that they considered inseparable from one other.

At the time, the Homeless Union opened its own shelters and led takeovers of vacant houses in the possession of the Department of Housing and Urban Development. These were their projects of survival. Through them, they secured housing and other resources for their leaders, loudly called into question why there were more empty houses nationally than homeless people, and forged unlikely alliances and political relationships.

More than 20 years later, homeless leaders have revived the National Union and are now making preparations for a winter organizing offensive on the streets and in encampments, shelters, and vacant homes across the country. As life-saving eviction moratoriums continue to expire nationwide, such projects of survival become shining examples of how poor and low-income people can begin to build a movement to end poverty.

Waking the Sleeping Giant

Last month, the Poor Peoples Campaign (which I co-chair with Reverand William Barber) released a new report on the unheralded impact of poor and low-income Americans in the 2020 elections. Contrary to the popular belief that poor people dont participate in elections and are apathetic about politics, it shows that poor and low-income voters made up at least 20% of the total electorate in 45 states, and up to 40% of them in nearly all of the battleground states. Although we dont know who those voters cast their ballots for, based on the state numbers its highly likely that Joe Biden and down-ballot Democrats won a significant percentage of them.

The report also examines the racial composition of those voters in key battleground states, revealing that poor folks turned out across race, including a large percentage of poor-white voters. This is significant, since their overall vote share throws into question the knee-jerk idea that poor white voters are a key part of Donald Trumps base. The data also suggests that its possible to form multiracial coalitions of poor and low-income voters, if brought together around a political agenda that speaks to their shared needs and concerns.

The most important takeaway from the report: poor and low-income voters are a sleeping giant whose late-night stirrings are already impacting elections and who, if fully awakened, could transform the political calculus of elections to come. The question, then, is how to awaken those millions of suffering, struggling Americans in a way that galvanizes them around a vision of lifting the country from the bottom up, so that everyone billionaires aside can rise.

The first part of the answer, Id suggest, is beginning within poor communities themselves, especially places where people are already taking life-saving action. The other part of the answer is finding new and creative ways to connect the survival strategies and projects of the poor to a wider movement that can move people beyond survival and toward building and wielding political power.

On this topic of power-building, Martin Luther Kings words again ring true today. In Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community, he wrote:

Our nettlesome task is to discover how to organize our strength into compelling power so that government cannot elude our demands. We must develop, from strength, a situation in which the government finds it wise and prudent to collaborate with us.

Yes, its once again time for poor and low-income people to come together across issues and lines of division, challenging the tired, yet still hegemonic narrative that blames them for their poverty, pits groups of them against each other, and feeds the lie of scarcity. Perhaps the Mass Poor Peoples and Low-Wage Workers Assembly and Moral March on Washington planned for the nations capital on June 18, 2022, will signal the building of just such a new political powerhouse before the midterm elections.

Indeed, the response of those elected to serve all the people in a historic hour of need suggests that there is much work still to be done. But if in the months to come, you stop for a moment and feel the earth beneath your feet, you might just sense the rumblings of a giant electorate of poor and low-income agents of social change waking from its slumber.

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Opinion | When Are We Going to Talk About the Outrageous Cost of NOT Passing the Build Back Better Act? - Common Dreams

The scuttlebutt on the streets of Plummer, Idaho, is that free government money is making people lazy and that accounts for the countrys labor shortage. Thats the snippet of conversation I eavesdropped upon, between a convenience store clerk and a police officer, while filling a takeout cup of coffee free of charge. Gotta toss out whats left at the end of the night anyway, she said.

The weekly $300 unemployment booster shot in the form of the Federal Pandemic Unemployment Compensation program ended Sept. 6. Perhaps that program did persuade some to stay on the couch. The bigger numbers dont square with that assumption. Who was I to argue though? The coffee was on the house and I still had 40 miles to drive.

We are in the throes of pandemic-induced cultural churn and attitudes towards work are a central part of the shift. Even after the recline-and-drink-your-keg money dried up, we experienced the biggest drop in the workforce participation rate since World War II. There is a lot more to the story.

Even among some of the more serious economists, there is doubt that workforce participation will return to the prepandemic status-quo, particularly at the bottom rungs of the labor ladder. Those bigger numbers: 8 million unemployed, and the more pressing curiosity: 10 million unfilled job openings. And mind you, these openings arent for Directors of Chemical Engineering or corporate Real Estate Vice Presidents; you must direct your attention to the bottom third of the pyramid, a layer actively being dismantled or otherwise chiseled away.

Sectors with the most dire labor shortages include hotels, daycare, and restaurants with employment down 17, 10, and 8 percent respectively. In the construction market alone, there are more unfilled positions than at any time over the last two decades. Well give only scant mention of the shortage of truckers and dock workers lest we get pulled into the frailty of the entire global supply chain.

So, why the attitude shift amongst hourly wage earners? As one striking union member with John Deere phrased it: this s--ts about to get real. He and 10,000 of his fellow assembly line workers are now on picket lines at plants in Iowa, Illinois and Kansas. What is real is that management is following a worn-out script (as are union members) and cutting pensions for all new John Deere employees. After all, they have to beat earnings-per-share estimates to line their pockets with multi-million-dollar bonuses.

As long as there is a sense of long-term security, there is a simmering tolerance for social inequity: management can have their mini-Tudor estates as long as workers can afford season tickets to the Mariners games. That sense of security has evaporated. Cost cutting in the form of production outsourcing, assembly robotics, reduced health care and pensions has sent a clear message.

The industrialization of the U.S. has had more than a few get real moments. During the Great Steel Strike of 1919, the U.S. Army was called-in to take control of Gary, Ind.; the steel mill strike of 1952 saw President Truman direct the government to seize and operate those factories. Perceived threats and inequities are nothing new to American labor.

While witnessing the waning, though vigorous, labor unrest from the last vestiges of our manufacturing sector (1,400 strikers at Kellogg; 1,000 coal miners in Alabama; 400 whiskey-makers in Kentucky, etc.), we see an increased militancy in the service sector and see examples in the form of teacher and nurse strikes across the country.

We see the fragmentation between upper middle class service workers who can work from the comfort of their homes on laptops and those who toil on the front lines: forced overtime, job burnout, and the ever-present health risks. Those who sweep the floors, drive the school buses, take care of our kids, slice our bacon, and fill our Amazon Prime cardboard boxes. A relevant study at MIT concluded that 70 percent of wage stagnation between 1980-2016 was due to automation. Machines dont get pregnant or COVID, as they say.

This phase of labor shortages and unrest is yet another get real moment in the saga of economic growth at all costs. No such thing as a free lunch even when the coffee is on the house.

After years of globetrotting, Broadman finds himself writing from his perch on the Palouse and loving the view. His policy briefs can be found at US Renew News: http://www.usrenewnews.org

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Latest chapter in the saga of wage slavery - Moscow-Pullman Daily News

MACON, Miss.On a hill in an area of Macon, Miss., that locals call Depot lies the remnants of Central Academy. Today, the facilities that opened in 1968 to defy school integration look a bit like the inhabitants were raptured. A jacket lies on empty bookcases stacked on their sides behind the glass doors of the John L. Barrett Elementary School. In the back, construction-paper cutouts circle a blackboard. A maroon office chair sits dusty near the entrance.

The windows of a yellow school bus backed up into the treeline are busted out. Likewise, overgrown trees and bushes obscure much of the large triangular white entryway to the high school with a big blue CA in the middle. Old sponsorship signs, like Macon Stockyard, still hang on the fence of the football field. The dilapidated dirty-white buildings dotting the 16-acre complex appear as though the previous occupants simply got up one day and walked away.

White parents chartered the nonprofit Noxubee Educational Foundation Inc. on Sept. 17, 1964just 17 days after the FBI found the bodies of three civil rights and Black education activists in nearby Neshoba County and as the U.S. Supreme Court inched closer to forcing southern schools to finally heed 1954s Brown v. Topeka Board of Education decision and integrate.

Businessman Arthur Varner, then the owner of Macon Oil Company and Noxubee Tire Service, built the white private school for a bargain $3 a foot, CAs now-defunct website explained. The Macon High School and Mississippi State University graduate attended Macon Presbyterian Church with John L. Barrett, who news accounts show resigned as superintendent of Noxubee County Schools in July 1968 and became headmaster of CA within days to help open it on Aug. 1, 1968.

Barrett was also a public-school product. He graduated from Shuqualak High School, south of Macon, and the University of Mississippi where he played football. As an educator, he had also been principal of Macon High School. He was active in white, conservative politics, which was then centered in the staunchly segregationist Democratic Party before an eventual party switch on race issues as the modern Republican Partystarted using the southern strategy to attract frustrated southern white Democrats.

His wife, Ann Ford Barrett, was Miss Macon High School and later a teacher at the still-segregated Macon Attendance Center before joining her husband to run Central Academy until they retired in 2007. She taught American and Mississippi history at CA, as well as reading. When she died in 2016, her family included Central Academy as one of the beneficiaries of gifts in lieu of flowers.

Central Academy was one of Mississippis dozens of segregation academies that opened in the 1960s in anticipation of a final Supreme Court mandate, while many others were founded in 1970 soon after the Alexander v. Holmes County Board of Education decision finally ended legal public-school segregation. White leaders in the always-majority-Black county with long-embedded inequities for its descendants of slaverydemanded and often got public funding even as they excluded Black children and openly taught racism to many of todays prominent white Mississippians and decision-makers.

Beatrice Alexander, a Black mother in Holmes County in the Mississippi Delta, was the woman who ultimately beat laws backing up segregated schools. She had sued the Delta school district for making no meaningful effort to integrate public schools and finally offer a truly equal education to Black children. She won her case when the U.S. Supreme Court told 30 Mississippi school districts to integrate by Feb. 1, 1970, with other southern district holdouts to follow suit.

White Noxubee County leaders were ready for that decision, however. They had refused since 1954 to give Supreme Court-mandated school desegregation efforts more than a wink and a nod. At the same time, white federal district judges in states like Mississippi sent mixed messages at best. Charles C. Bolton wrote in The Hardest Deal of All: The Battle Over School Integration in Mississippi, 1870-1980 that the state and its school districts made efforts in the freedom of choice years of 1964 to 1968 to invest more into Black public schools than they ever had in order to stave off full desegregation.

Until then, white Mississippi had intentionally starved Black public schools out of resources with inadequate or crumbling facilities with no plan to change it. In the shadow of the Brown decision, the Noxubee County School District and others started consolidating tiny Black schools and allocating more resources and building investment for what they still called Negro schools, Bolton wrote.

One Mississippi-based judge even ruled in 1966 in writing that Noxubee districts had to abolish separate schools, while threatening white district officials verbally that he would transfer 400 Black students into the white schools if white district officials didnt improve the remaining schools. The idea was to buy themselves out of school integration.

Meantime, white State of Mississippi and Noxubee leaders were preparing for what they considered the worst outcome: forced integration. The same year Central Academys nonprofit formed, in 1964, the Mississippi Legislature passed a State-organized tuition-grant law to allow transfer of tax funds to white parents moving their kids to private segregated schoolswhat is today referred to as school vouchers.

That pay-off helped get early seg academies off the ground, including rural Leake Academy near Carthage and rabidly racist Citizen Council schools in Jackson, Bolton wrote. One of white Mississippis most urgent concerns was that mixed schools would lead to miscegenation, or race-mixing, with an inferior race, which would in turn destroy the supposedly superior white race.

Gov. Paul B. Johnson Jr. called the special session in 1964 that approved the early voucher law. He had run a virulently racist campaign the year before, repeating in his stump speeches that NAACP stood for Ns, Alligators, Apes, Coons and Possums.

Academy founders like CAs Barrett, who was also a leader in the Mississippi Private School Association that formed to support segregation academies, believed that money paid to send white kids to their own schools should be tax-deductible and that white families deserved tax dollars from the State of Mississippi to ensure their kids were educated in white-only schools.

Secret Services for the Seg Academy

Resistant white families continued well past 1970 to believe they were entitled to take public resources with them as they slammed public-school doors behind them. Central Academy, in fact, did battle with the federal government and civil-rights activists throughout much of its tenure over its practices to remain segregated and nonprofit. The IRS revoked CAs tax-exempt status in 1971 due to its refusal to admit Black children, but it kept trying to suck in public resources.

By 1978, the Mississippi attorney generals office had to force four academiesManchester Academy in Yazoo City, Washington Academy in Greenville, Pillow Academy in Greenwood and Noxubees Central Academyto repay $50,000 in public funds misallocated to the whites-only schools.

In 1982, when President Ronald Reagan disagreed with the one Democratic and two Republican presidents before him and tried to make segregation academies tax-exempt again, the IRS included CA on a list of 111 private schools with revoked status due to racism in admissions. Dozens were in Mississippi including academies in nearby Starkville, Meridian and Columbus, and several in the capital city including Jackson Academy and Citizen Council schools. Bob Jones University in South Carolina was also on the list.

Reagan would eventually withdraw support for the re-exemption after the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under the Law in Mississippi obtained an injunction to stop it.

One ongoing Central Academy problem for the countys public schools was that the seg academys connections to white Noxubee County school-board members helped it draw resources directly from the public-school district. In 1982, Morris Kinsey of the NAACP and state Rep. Tyrone Ellis of Starkville demanded that all Noxubee County board members with knowledge of the secret help for CA to resign.

After all, it wasnt like the white power structure of school boards disappeared when Beatrice Alexander won her Supreme Court case in late 1969. With school-board members elected, many boards remained under white control through the 1970s with Black candidates meeting a wall of resistance from white voters, Charles Bolton explained in his book.

In 1975, Black Noxubee County school music teacher Reecy Dickson decided to run for the school board saying the white members didnt really care how Black children were educated. She ran pregnant as an independent candidate, helping new Black voters register, Bolton wrote. She was threatened, her car vandalized, and her opponent painted her as a crazy woman. The white county attorney also visited Black homes hinting at voter irregularities, and white people harassed Black voters at the polls with insults like you cant read, Bolton recounted.

Dickson lost. The district then tried to fire her, but she later ran for superintendent in 1979 and won, prompting the all-white superintendents staff to quit. She was the first Black person elected to a county-wide office in Noxubee in the 20th century, despite its historic Black majority, but the majority-white board resisted Dicksons requests.

By the time she left office in 1984, four of the total five school-board members were Black, Bolton wrotewhich finally made it harder for the board to slip taxpayer-funded freebies to Central Academy.

By the time Central Academy closed in 2017 due to costs and withering enrollment, it had followed suit of other schools founded to segregate white kids and was admitting a small number of Black children, usually in low single-digit percentages, still a trend today in most schools that opened to only admit white kids. Like so many others, CA had rebranded itself fully by then as a Christian academy, promising high-level college prep with its slogan Unlocking and expanding Gods great giftthe mind.

CAs website stated in 2016 that it used the Abeka and Bob Jones curriculafundamentalist Christian textbooks and lesson plans that helped grow multi-million-dollar companies as families left public schools and fled to religious and segregation academies starting in the 1960s and 1970s. Both Abeka and Bob Jones teaching materials are based on core conservative religious and political beliefs that often run counter to both science and the critical thinking needed to succeed on the college level and, especially, to understand efforts at racial justice through the Civil Rights Movement or todays Black Lives Matter movement.

Abeka founders Arlin and Rebekah Horton had met when they attended Bob Jones University in Greenville, S.C. Bob Jones Sr., a segregationist who said it was Gods idea, founded BJU in 1927 during the Scopes controversy to, in part, resist teaching the science of evolution. Long after its namesake, and de jure school segregation, died in the 1960s, the college drew national attention in 2000 for its ban on interracial dating after George W. Bush made a stop at the college during his presidential campaign.

Christianity Today reported then that BJU had refused to admit Black students starting in the 1950s until the 1970s, justifying its racist bans by saying that God created people differently for a reason. Like myriad seg academies, BJU lost its tax-exempt status in 1983 due to its segregationist policies.

After their bond formed at Bob Jones, the Hortons later founded a small private school, Pensacola Christian Academy, in Florida in 1954incidentally the same year as the Brown v. Board decision. From there, the couple developed its popular K-12 curriculum that has guided the education of generations of children for nearly 70 years. The Bob Jones curriculum came after forced school integration.

In the early 1970s, the Lord impressed two Bob Jones University science professors to write its first textbooks, the BJU website explains. In 1978, BJU released a book that its website says established a scriptural defense of the Christian school movement.

The Orlando Sentinel reported on Abekas finances, as well as its political and revisionist curricula, in 2018: Today, Abeka Academy Inc. takes in $45.6 million in revenue$6 million less than its reported expenses of $51 millionaccording to the nonprofits tax documents for the financial year that ended May 2017. The Sentinel reported that private schools that use the Abeka and similar curricula also participate in that states $1-billion voucher strategy to pay for low-income students with special needs to attend private academies, which often can afford services public schools cannot.

Central Academys curricula went far beyond teaching basics of Christianity; it pushed the kind of conservative economics and politics that routinely calls for the rejection of government assistance. It is a political philosophy that tends to blame and disparage those living in deeply entrenched poverty in a county like Noxubee with its long history of racism, white terrorism and intentional practices that blocked Black children from education and resources equal to that white students enjoyed often with government help.

Even in first-grade history lessons, Abeka teaches the benefits of free-enterprise economics in contrast with the dangers of Communism, socialism and liberalismwhat the Washington Post called a gospel of wealth. In at least some versions, its 11th-grade history text is dismissive about the effects of poverty on communities saying that a lack of homeowners pride helps lead to vandalized and neglected housing, when the realities are far more complicated.

Both Abeka and Bob Jones curricula contain lessons downplaying the harms and realities of slavery, blaming the nations first Black president for worsening race relations, dismissing the Black Lives Matter movement as harmful to America and romanticizing the Confederacy. In their versions that have reached millions of students since 1972, white Americans have done little wrong throughout history.

In fact, Abekas 11th-grade history text pushes the white-supremacist myth that the Ku Klux Klan was a secret society meant to improve southern lives during Reconstruction and only sometimes resorted to violencerather than a more accurate telling of KKK terrorism captured in public and government documents, as Michael Newton details in his county-level book on the KKK in Mississippi.

It certainly doesnt teach that the KKK, started by Confederate offices and planters, and its myriad progenitor and copycat groups used force and threats in its mission to burn and terrorize Noxubees early Black schools. Nor that the KKK brutalized Black educators in the county to prevent the education of advancement of the majority of the countys children.

Abekas textbook America: Land I Love In Christian Perspective shared a popular white myth about Black people during Jim Crow segregation and the Civil Rights Movement: Most black and white Southerners had long lived together in harmony; they had been taught to accept segregation as a way of life, it states as if it was fact that Black people enjoyed complete white control over their lives, choices, education and opportunities. The same textbook has declared: Through the Negro spiritual, the slaves developed the patience to wait on the Lord and discovered that the truest freedom is from the bondage of sin.

The 2005 edition of the same book honors a prominent slave owner and Confederate leader with a full-page tribute called Robert E. Lee: The Great Christian General. The text avoided Lees less-than-Christian approach to slavery and his documented abuse of enslaved Black people, but pointed out that he loved the Biblerepresentative examples of revisionist lessons that earned the Abeka text horrified reviews on Amazon.

Central Academy wasnt the only private school that emerged in the wake of forced integration that drew white kids out of the Noxubee County schools.

Six years after the Brown v. Topeka (Kansas) Board of Education decision, six Mennonite families moved from the Midwest to the sweeping flatlands of northeastern Noxubee County, including out toward Prairie Point, the site of many plantations with enslaved Black workers when the Civil War began. Most of the early planters families eventually moved on once free Black labor was no longer available, and the area was overwhelmingly Black when the Mennonites showed up and started buying the remnants of earlier plantations.

The first families, members of the Conservative Mennonite Conference in Indiana and descended from Anabaptist traditions, had come south in 1960 looking for fertile soil for farming and to establish a new outpost for their evangelization by colonization strategy, as religion historian David R. Swartz wrote for Mennonite Quarterly Review in 2014.

In Noxubee Countys northeast precinct, the white Mennonite families started buying up decaying plantations in an area where 3,360 Black people and 329 whites lived in 1960, but with no Black people in the county registered to vote. In so doing, Swartz wrote, many Black families lost land where they hunted and fished as had the Choctaws before them in the countyfor both communities, a vital part of keeping their families fed.

The religious pioneers also established the Magnolia Conservative Mennonite Church as the center of their new community, initially sending their children to still-segregated public schools. Swartz writes that the Mennonites were caught in the middle of Mississippis race wars. By faith, they were more sensitive toward blacks than their white neighbors, he writes, and more likely to associate across race lines. But white people were in total control; the banks wanted to loan money to the religious immigrants; and the local economy needed Mennonite money and job creation.

Noxubee County was bleeding population when Mennonites started buying up landit would fall from 25,669 people in 1940 to 14,236 by 1970, dropping by half in the northeast precinct where the Mennonites chose to resettle, replacing many farm jobs with mechanization.

When the Mennonites arrived, local whites had a code in place in Noxubee County to keep Black wages low and inequity embedded: no livable wages. They, thus, pressured the Mennonites not to follow their instincts to raise wages for Black field workers they might hire to more than $2 a day, thus helping keep Black earning potential suppressed even as white supremacists pointed to cycles of Black poverty as evidence of inferiority and lazinessstill a myth for many Americans today.

Swartz reported that the median income for nonwhite farm workers in Noxubee County was $714 a year then with the median income for white people four times as much.

White Noxubee County residents had demanded wage and economic suppression for Black people since losing the Civil War and the right to free labor, as well as violently targeting Black schools and educators for decades to stop advancement. A major goal of the early KKK and similar violent groups in Noxubee County was to economically subjugate Black people so that the majority of the white citizens may control labor, as Newton reported in his book on the Mississippi KKK. The terrorists response was to target both Black and white people who violated their plan to keep American descendants of slavery mired in poverty.

Steeped in historic irony, the agrarian Mennonites did well farming former Choctaw lands with many over time coming to Noxubee County from west of the Mississippi River, including Oklahoma and Kansas. They, like earlier white planters decades before them, thrived on fertile acreage ceded in the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek signed in Mashulaville in Noxubee County over a century after most tribal members left their homeland and trudged the Trail of Tears and Death as one Choctaw chief called it, to those very states Mennonites were leaving.

Mennonites also settled in Mashulaville near the treaty site and other Mississippi counties in the early 1960s, opening the Mashulaville Mississippi, a Choctaw Indian mission, to minister to the remaining Choctaw community there.

The first 12 to 15 years were fairly prosperous for our people, Mennonite Galen Nichols told The Clarion-Ledger in 1985. Farming has been good to us.

By their faiths dictates, religion historian Swartz writes, Mennonites are separatist, protectionist, non-confrontational and refuse to vote or run for office, which meant that, as a community, many were reluctant to stand up for Black equality for their new Noxubee County neighbors as the Civil Rights Movement swirled around them.

But there were exceptions. Mennonite Larry Miller moved south from Indiana and became active in the Civil Rights Movement, he says on his page on the Civil Rights Movement Veterans website. I helped people register to vote, took them to doctors, worked at a Native American church mission, and was in and out of trouble for reasons that I cared about the poor people around me, Miller wrote.

I remember the day that Martin Luther King was killed. Black people were weeping tears of sorrow, and white people were jubilant. It was and often still is, this seedbed of racism and selfishness that I and my family have had experiences in Noxubee County. I married my childhood girlfriend, went to college in the south and own a farm now in Macon, Mississippi. I am a teacher in public schools and am active (in) lots of community development activities.

But as a general rule, Mennonite immigrants into Mississippi were both socialized and intimidated into adapting to the white segregated culture, historian Swartz found.

That was never more apparent to Black people in Noxubee County than after the 1970 Supreme Court decision ending segregated public schools.

Within months of the early 1970 Alexander v. Holmes decision meant to finally end segregated education, the Noxubee Mennonites pulled their kids out of public schools and launched their own private institutions. That included Magnolia Mennonite School between Macon and Brooksville (now called Magnolia Christian School since the 1990s) and South Haven Mennonite School about 10 miles from Magnolia east of Macon near Prairie Point.

Conviction arose within the hearts of our brethren for the need of our own school, where Bible doctrine and principles could be included in their educational curriculum, Swartz quoted local Mennonites saying. But he wasnt completely buying it.

That such a conviction coincided so directly with the desegregation of the public schools was, at the very least, unfortunate, Swartz wrote. He added that the Mennonite departure left only two white members of the senior class at Noxubee County High School in Macon with the pubilc-school system then more segregated than before the Supreme Court stepped in.

In 1974, the Delta Democrat-Times reported, the South Haven Mennonite School was included with three openly racist segregation academiesSylva Day Academy in Bay Springs; West Tallahatchie Academy at Tutwiler and Country Day School at Marks, Miss.in a federal court ruling that they were ineligible for the state-funded textbooks they were already using.

The reason? The four fully white schools had racially discriminatory admissions policies, U.S. District Judge William C. Keady ruled. It was three years after the IRS had revoked Central Academys tax-exempt status for the same reason.

Todays Noxubee County Mennonites welcome Black students into their majority-white schools and work with local Black and Native Americans in mission work. But Noxubee County schools are nearly as segregated as theyve ever been. Even after Central Academy closed in 2017, white kids remaining in Noxubee County did not rejoin the public schools.

Instead of those kids coming here, they went on to Kemper Academy, Noxubee County High School principal Aiesha Brooks told the Mississippi Free Press about another historic seg academy in the next county south of Noxubee. Believe it or not, we still have teachers here who still send their kids to the academies.

Today, the now-consolidated Noxubee County School District serves all public-school students in the full county in its facilities in Macon with all other local public schools closed. Now under State of Mississippi takeover, the Noxubee district is over 97% Black, 1% white, 1% Hispanic and 1% two or more races. As of the 2020 Census, Noxubee County is 69.9% Black, 25.6% white and 2.4% two or more races.

Torsheta Jackson contributed to this report.

This in-depth Noxubee County historic report is part of the (In)Equity and Resilience, Black Women, Systemic Barriers and COVID-19 project looking at systemic inequities long facing Mississippis Black women and their families and institutions that the pandemic revealed and exacerbated in Mississippi. In upcoming weeks and months, the BWC Project team is publishing what their systemic reporting and numerous solution circles with Black women revealed about three counties (so far): Noxubee (education); Hinds (violence and public safety) and Holmes (health care adequacy and access). The journalists are following up each county overview with specific solutions-journalisms pieces about problems their reporting revealed.

Also see:Jackson Advocate Publisher DeAnna Tisdales opening column introducing the BWC Project and Torsheta Jacksons overview of systemic inequities in her native Noxubee County.Visit the full BWC Project microsite here.

This project is a collaboration between theMississippi Free Pressand theJackson Advocatewith support from theSolutions Journalism Network.

Write solutions@mississippifreepress.org to offer feedback on the reporting or reach out to Kimberly Griffin at kimberly@mississippifreepress.org if youd like to sponsor work in additional counties for this project.

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Why School Integration Never Happened in Noxubee County, Miss. - Mississippi Free Press

The scuttlebutt on the streets of Plummer, Idaho, is that free government money is making people lazy and that accounts for the countrys labor shortage. Thats the snippet of conversation I eavesdropped upon, between a convenience store clerk and a police officer, while filling a takeout cup of coffee free of charge. Gotta toss out whats left at the end of the night anyway, she said.

The weekly $300 unemployment booster shot in the form of the Federal Pandemic Unemployment Compensation program ended Sept. 6. Perhaps that program did persuade some to stay on the couch. The bigger numbers dont square with that assumption. Who was I to argue though? The coffee was on the house and I still had 40 miles to drive.

We are in the throes of pandemic-induced cultural churn and attitudes towards work are a central part of the shift. Even after the recline-and-drink-your-keg money dried up, we experienced the biggest drop in the workforce participation rate since World War II. There is a lot more to the story.

Even among some of the more serious economists, there is doubt that workforce participation will return to the prepandemic status-quo, particularly at the bottom rungs of the labor ladder. Those bigger numbers: 8 million unemployed, and the more pressing curiosity: 10 million unfilled job openings. And mind you, these openings arent for Directors of Chemical Engineering or corporate Real Estate Vice Presidents; you must direct your attention to the bottom third of the pyramid, a layer actively being dismantled or otherwise chiseled away.

Sectors with the most dire labor shortages include hotels, daycare, and restaurants with employment down 17, 10, and 8 percent respectively. In the construction market alone, there are more unfilled positions than at any time over the last two decades. Well give only scant mention of the shortage of truckers and dock workers lest we get pulled into the frailty of the entire global supply chain.

So, why the attitude shift amongst hourly wage earners? As one striking union member with John Deere phrased it: this s--ts about to get real. He and 10,000 of his fellow assembly line workers are now on picket lines at plants in Iowa, Illinois and Kansas. What is real is that management is following a worn-out script (as are union members) and cutting pensions for all new John Deere employees. After all, they have to beat earnings-per-share estimates to line their pockets with multi-million-dollar bonuses.

As long as there is a sense of long-term security, there is a simmering tolerance for social inequity: management can have their mini-Tudor estates as long as workers can afford season tickets to the Mariners games. That sense of security has evaporated. Cost cutting in the form of production outsourcing, assembly robotics, reduced health care and pensions has sent a clear message.

The industrialization of the U.S. has had more than a few get real moments. During the Great Steel Strike of 1919, the U.S. Army was called-in to take control of Gary, Ind.; the steel mill strike of 1952 saw President Truman direct the government to seize and operate those factories. Perceived threats and inequities are nothing new to American labor.

While witnessing the waning, though vigorous, labor unrest from the last vestiges of our manufacturing sector (1,400 strikers at Kellogg; 1,000 coal miners in Alabama; 400 whiskey-makers in Kentucky, etc.), we see an increased militancy in the service sector and see examples in the form of teacher and nurse strikes across the country.

We see the fragmentation between upper middle class service workers who can work from the comfort of their homes on laptops and those who toil on the front lines: forced overtime, job burnout, and the ever-present health risks. Those who sweep the floors, drive the school buses, take care of our kids, slice our bacon, and fill our Amazon Prime cardboard boxes. A relevant study at MIT concluded that 70 percent of wage stagnation between 1980-2016 was due to automation. Machines dont get pregnant or COVID, as they say.

This phase of labor shortages and unrest is yet another get real moment in the saga of economic growth at all costs. No such thing as a free lunch even when the coffee is on the house.

After years of globetrotting, Broadman finds himself writing from his perch on the Palouse and loving the view. His policy briefs can be found at US Renew News: http://www.usrenewnews.org

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His View: Latest chapter in the saga of wage slavery - Moscow-Pullman Daily News

By Camille Gustafson (October 22, 2021, 12:40 PM EDT) -- Based on the recommendations of diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging committees, employers may be thoughtfully considering what their holiday calendars should look like in 2022 to promote diversity and foster a more inclusive workplace.

One impactful addition to the corporate holiday calendar is Juneteenth, commemorating the end of slavery in the U.S., which Congress designated a federal holiday for the first time in 2021.

The addition of Juneteenth to the holiday calendar does not raise any special wage and hour concerns. However, another change companies may be considering does raise wage and hour concerns: the addition of so-called floating holidays, or...

In the legal profession, information is the key to success. You have to know whats happening with clients, competitors, practice areas, and industries. Law360 provides the intelligence you need to remain an expert and beat the competition.

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Calif. Wage And Hour Issues When Adding Paid Holidays - Law360

I cant support raising the tax on marijuana. Its not that all taxes are bad, but Amendment 119 got my no vote last week because some taxes make things worse instead of better.

The proposed tax is intended to generate up to $137 million annually to fund education of a privatized form, tutoring and out-of-school education with some of the benefit likely to help disadvantaged kids who were kept home to avoid COVID-19.

That sounds good. Low-income children should have access to the kind of help that upper-income families routinely provide for their students. The real issue, for me, is simple. Why are we creating an independent, privatized education system when we already have an underfunded state system that could provide the same programs and services under local control?

Colorado is and has been a bottom-feeder in the per-pupil rankings for many decades. The anti-tax crusaders managed to cripple school funding 30 years ago with the Taxpayer Bill of Rights amendment, or TABOR, that requires a broad array of restrictions on state and local taxation and spending.

The voters tried to fix that with a constitutional amendment in the year 2000, requiring that the state allocate an additional 1% per year above inflation for 10 years and at the rate of inflation thereafter.

Alas, thereafter never came about as the legislature, with the lovely Republicans in control, rejiggered per-pupil spending to avoid funding education as required by Amendment 23. The result was and is that local district support fell behind by $1 billion or more annually. The $1 billion negative factor remains under the moniker Budget Stabilization Factor. Colorados per-pupil funding is stabilized for sure, being between 37th and 46th in the nation. Welcome to Texas North.

So, we have an underfunded public system that has forced hundreds of districts to adopt a class schedule of four days a week. Malicious side effect: Some kids in truly low-income districts lose weight because they get only eight instead of 10 school meals per week. Believe it or not, we have many rural counties where minimum wage provides a family with only $15,000 a year for housing, clothing, food and transportation.

Taxing pot is attractive to politicos because it falls on sinners like myself who are a minority of the population and often derided as slackers and potheads. To be sure, I cant remember the last time I smoked a joint, not because the weed here is good enough to wipe out my memory but because my use is confined to CBD, an anti-inflammatory that is activated by a small fraction of THC, the fun ingredient in marijuana.

Not coincidentally, the states nonpartisan legislative council notes that this tax is regressive in that it hits low-income people proportionately harder than upper-income users. Instead of taxing all of us evenly for education enhancements or, God forbid, taxing the wealthiest at a higher rate, this amendment proves irony is not dead by placing the heaviest burden on those with the least.

Sound familiar? Private space programs for the zillionaires, more tax burdens at the bottom. If that doesnt ring a bell, maybe Kyrsten Sinema does.

One of the great things about local control and public education is that we (the people and taxpayers) therefore can elect people who support fact- and science-based education. Amendment 119 allows grants to out-of-state corporations, faith-based schools and home-schoolers who are not accountable to the public. Do we really want a system that privately teaches the Holocaust as a mere allegation to be refuted, American History as a fairy tale and slavery as a lucky break for those in chains?

When I and others initially supported legalizing marijuana, we hoped it would wipe out the illegal dope-dealer network living the capitalist-libertarian dream that often ended in violence and corruption. Alas, the black market of drugs and money remains. Making legal pot ever more expensive will keep the black market alive. Jail space, law officers, courts and public defenders are already in short supply reinvigorating the illegal dope trade wont help.

What we should be doing is talking about how to fully fund education, not out-of-state corporations who may well teach the Gospel of Wealth or the glory of being a slave rather than the truth. In the meantime, a no vote on Amendment 119 is a good start toward doing the right thing.

Mick Ireland hopes to return to substitute teaching next semester and thinks dope dealers can get a real job. Contact him at Mick@sopris.net.

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Ireland: Lets just say no to another tax on sin - Aspen Daily News

Every Friday, TVO.org provides a summary of the most notable developments in Ontario politics over the past week.

Heres what caught our attention:

Reopening:Capacity limits onon restaurants, bars, gyms, casinos, bingo halls and indoor events spaces will be lifted on Monday as part of a reopening plan released Friday afternoonby the provincial government. Other measures will be ended gradually, with all measures lifted by lateMarch if all goes well.This plan is built for the long term. It will guide us safely through the winter and out of this pandemic, while avoiding lockdowns and ensuring we dont lose the hard-fought gains weve made, Premier Doug Ford said. TVO.org's John Michael McGrath says Ford's plan is a good one if he can stick to it.

No snap election: Asked on Friday by TVO's Harrison Lowman, Ford said he would not call an early election and committed to the planned vote on June 2, 2022.

Park out:Durham MPP Lindsey Park announced late Friday she was resigning from the Progressive Conservative caucus, saying the government's claim earlier this month that she misrepresented her vaccination status was false.Given the breakdown in trust that has transpired, I have decided that it is not possible to continue as a Progressive Conservative member in the legislature," she wrote in a statement. She also indicated she does not plan to run for reelection.

You can count on TVO to cover the stories others dontto fill the gaps in the ever-changing media landscape. But we cant do this without you.

Modern-day slavery: The province announced Monday it plans that aims to crack down on abuses by companies that recruit temporary workers. Minister of Labour Monte McNaughton said legislation will be introduced that will impose mandatory licensing for temporary help agencies, as well as creating a dedicated team of inspectors to keep tabs on the industry. In particular, McNaughton said, he wants to stop agencies that exploit temporary foreign workers by withholding their passports or paying them less than minimum wage. "This is modern-day slavery, it's unacceptable," he said in an interview with CBC News.

Bathroom breaks: Monte McNaughton also announced this week the province intends to introduce legislation which will ensure couriers, truck drivers, and food delivery workers have access to bathrooms at businesses where they are picking up items or making deliveries. This is something most people in Ontario take for granted but access to washrooms is a matter of common decency currently being denied to hundreds of thousands of workers in this province, he said in a statement.

Skilled immigrants: It proved to be quite a busy week for McNaughton. On Thursday, he announced new legislation to force some professional organizations to drop Canadian work experience as part of their licensing criteria and ensure licensing applications get processed faster. This should have the effect of allowing skilled immigrants to obtain work in their chosen field more easily. Its important that we ensure that everyones talent is being used and we unleash their talent to its full capacity, McNaughton told the Toronto Star. The measures will apply to 37 professions and trades including architecture, teaching, and plumbing. Bodies regulating medical professions, however, would not be affected.

Wont back down: Premier Doug Ford continues to reject calls to apologize for comments roundly criticized by the opposition as insensitive to immigrants. On Monday, Ford said the province is in such desperate need of people from around the world, then went on to add: You come here like every other new Canadian. You work your tail off. If you think you're coming to collect the dole and sit around, its not going to happen. Go somewhere else." Asked on Wednesday by NDP MPP for Brampton East Gurratan Singh whether he would apologize for the comments that "play into racist stereotypes about new Canadians, Ford refused, saying he had been "inundated with messages from your community, the Sikh community, that said 'You were bang on.'"

Property taxes: There appears to be a fight going on behind closed doors as to when homeowners will get their new property assessments. Sources tell the Globe and Mail the province intends to send them out after provincial election in June which would avoid the government having to deal with voter unease over possible property tax increases during the campaign. But municipal politicians are worried that sending out the assessments at that point will put them in a bind, since theyre campaigning for reelection next fall. Listen, theres no question that that would probably add a level of anxiety for people, at a time when so much has been changing in all our lives for the last 18 months, Kitchener Mayor Berry Vrbanovic said in an interview.

Highway 413: Premier Doug Fords already campaigning for reelection on it, but all the opposition parties are expressing deep concern over Highway 413, a proposed 60-km road linking Milton and Vaughan northwest of Toronto. Constructing the highway would require paving over thousands of acres of farmland, waterways, and protected land. Green Party Leader Mike Schreiner said this week the highway would be a climate disaster, citing a study that it would result in 17.4 million tons of greenhouse gas emissions being released between now and 2050. Both the NDP and Liberals say that on top of environmental damage, the highway would be a waste of taxpayers dollars that wouldnt do much to lower commute times. But Progressive Conservative strategists have told CBC News they think the highway is a winning issue for them.

Tampon inequality: NDP MPP for Kiiwetinoong Sol Mamakwa says a recent government announcement of free menstrual products for Ontario schools falls short, since some First Nations schools arent included. The problem is that since the First Nations-run schools are funded federally, they arent part of the provincial program. Mamakwa told the legislature Wednesday its unfortunate that not for the first time jurisdictional issues come at the expense of Indigenous communities. He also notedthese schools are often located in places where such a program is most needed:northern communities where feminine products can cost significantly more than in southern Ontario.

Mini-budget: Finance Minister Peter Bethlenvalvy has announced he will present a mini-budget on Nov. 4. He said Wednesday that it will be a plan that will protect the hard work and sacrifice of the people of Ontario in our fight against the COVID-19 pandemic.

Paramedicine: Minister of Long-Term Care Rod Phillips announced Friday that the province was spending $80 million to expand paramedicine services to all eligible seniors. Paramedicine allows paramedics to care for seniors in their homes while they wait for space to open at a long-term care facility. The program is already available in 33 communities, but will now be implemented in 22 more, giving the service province-wide coverage.

Randy: Independent MPP for Lanark-Frontenac-Kingston Randy Hillier is being accused of misrepresenting a young woman's death in social media posts that question the effectiveness of vaccines. Farisa Navab, 20, died on Sept. 11 from a rare autoimmune disease. But Hillier suggests she and other people featured in the posts died or suffered from a "permanent adverse reaction shortly after receiving their first or second dose of the COVID-19 vaccine." Navabs sister, Ammarah, told CBC News its complete fake news to imply her sister died because of a vaccine. It's somebody in power who's posting to thousands of followers, lying about my sister's death and using it as 'proof' ... It's disgusting," she added. In an e-mailed statement, Hillier said: The obligation and responsibility of every elected member is not simply to accept or promote public policy, but rather to examine and question public policy and provide supportive or critical commentary based upon observation and evidence.

The Agenda: Has Ontario's 2022 election already begun?

The federal election has barely ended, but Ontario's political parties are already releasing their attack ads for a provincial election more than seven months away. As the Ford government responds to a fourth wave of COVID-19 and populist backlash, The Agenda invited strategists to discuss what the political landscape looks like today.

#onpoli podcast: The 411 on vaccine QR codes

Vaccine QR codes are here. In this week's episode, hosts Steve Paikin and John Michael McGrath discussed how they work, the difference from the paper receipt, and whether the app stores your personal information. Also, they did a fact-check of the Progressive Conservative's latest election advertising.

The Tories should be ashamed of their third-party election-spending law

Bill 307 isnt a bad law because it lacks a purpose,Matt Gurney writes. And its not bad because it required the notwithstanding clause. Its bad, he argues, because its sloppy and open to abuse.

Yes, we should talk about ranked ballots. But we need to talk about a whole lot more

Liberal leader Steven Del Duca is promising major voting changes. In the lead-up to the election, we need to press all parties for details about their visions of democratic reform, writes John Michael McGrath.

Fifty years ago this week, the Bill Davis legend began

Bill Davis won his first of four straight elections as premier 50 years ago this week. Steve Paikin looks back.

Beyond the Pink Palace

The Agenda: What's Next for Ontario's Landlords and Tenants?

Landlords and tenants discuss the coming rent increases after they were frozen for a year due to the pandemic.

COVID-19 modelling: Data released by the province's science advisory table Friday morning suggested new coronavirus cases should remain stable over the next month, even with a modest increase in social contacts. However, the advisory tables modelling says public health measures such as masking, vaccine certificates, symptom screening and ventilation need to stay in place to avoid a fresh surge of infections.

Subways, subways, subways: The idea that the pandemic should make the province rethink its plan to build more subways in Toronto is flawed. Subways were a good idea before COVID-19 and theyll be a good idea after it, writes Shoshanna Saxe.

Gig economy: While the government announced this week it will make sure people who make deliveries will have access to bathrooms, those who drive and make deliveries using apps such as Uber and Skip the Dishes are calling for something more. They want the province to classify them as employees. Currently, they are classified as independent contractors, which means they are not legally entitled to measures other workers take for granted, including minimum wage, vacation days, or statutory holiday pay. When asked by CBC News, Labour Minister Monte McNaughton did not promise to reclassify gig economy workers as employees, he did say new protections were on the way.

Goodbye CRB, hello CWLB: The federal government has announced that the Canada Recovery Benefit will expire tomorrow, and will be replaced by a more targeted program to help workers through potential lockdowns. The Canada Worker Lockdown Benefit would provide $300 a week to workers who are subject to a lockdown. It comes into effect on Sunday. Some economists and business groups say the ending of federal wage and rent subsidy programs is happening too quickly.

This article was updated at 4:20 p.m. on Friday.

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Whats ON: The week that was in Ontario politics (October 18-22) - TVO

In 40 states, hourly pay still does not exceed $ 5 for workers authorized to receive tips. (FILE)

Slavery survives in the 21st century, who is fighting to abolish federal legislation that sets the pay of $2.13 per hour for restaurant workers, particularly waiters, in the worlds leading power.

Its an economic, racial and gender justice problem that has only gotten worse under covid-19, charges Jayaraman, one of the founders of One Fair Wage, an organization that advocates for decent incomes and job security for workers in the sector.

The service sector is one of the fastest-growing sectors in the United States but pays the worst wages. For example, the restaurant industry alone employs 14 million people. Of those, six million supplement their salaries with tips.

Many restaurant corporations consider that it is the customers who have to pay the wages of their workers, laments this energetic woman to AFP.

In restaurants, cabs, manicure, hairdressing, and now the workers of companies that operate through apps, at the time of payment, the customer has several options: add 18%, 20%, 25%, or even more tip, which completes his salary.

Although wages are often dictated by the market, in 40 states, hourly pay still does not exceed $5 for tipped workers. In addition, only in seven states have wages been brought up to the $15 minimum wage minimum income/hour for all other workers.

The attack on the Twin Towers, in which 74 workers were killed at the luxurious Windows of the World restaurant on the 107th floor of one of the towers, marked a turning point in the struggle for a fair income.

Many survivors were placed in other company restaurants. But others were left without jobs, and the families of the victims were without income.

Thats when One Fair Wages was created. We started by seeking help for families who lost loved ones and workers who lost their jobs, Jayaraman says.

Today, with 300,000 members, the movement is fighting for Congress to enact legislation to increase the federal minimum income for these workers.

At a recent meeting organized by this movement, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton wondered why it is difficult to convince every state and Congress that no person in America should work for $2.13 an hour.

Its shameful! she bellowed.

New York is an isolated case, Jayaraman admits. In good restaurants, waiters can make up to six figures a year. But thats the exception.

Brian, a 29-year-old waiter who has been working in the industry for ten years, explains to AFP that the city pays $15, although tipped servers get $10 an hour.

Brian wont say how much comes into his bank account from tips, but he assures that being a waiter is the best-paying hourly job in the city.

You have a better chance of making more money than any other job, he assures. The owners of his restaurant, located in a residential area east of Central Park, even offer their employees health insurance.

A luxury that not everyone can afford. Javier, a Mexican who works in a fast-food chain in the Grand Central Station area, assures that he can earn up to 2,300 dollars but at a stroke of hours. When you exceed the statutory 40 hours a week, overtime is paid at $22.50, he says with satisfaction to AFP.

According to a recent study by One Fair Wage, about a third of workers are suffering more violations of their rights than last year, and tips have fallen, while sexual assaults and abuse have increased in a sector that employs mostly women.

Since the coronavirus shutdown of the restaurant industry, many workers have left for other jobs. The latest Labor Department data show that as of July, the industry had lost nearly 1 million jobs from pre-pandemic levels, and 75% of employers in the sector were having difficulty finding staff, the highest level recorded in two decades, according to the National Restaurant Association.

Barbara Sibley, the owner of La Palapa Mexican food restaurants, has opted to pay fair wages to her workers. Employees are part of what we do. I couldnt do anything without them, she tells AFP.

Along with hers, a thousand restaurants across the country have joined a new ethic where employees receive wages and social benefits.

When you talk about a business plan its complex because you have to take into account other costs and things, but if you plan to have equity you make the system youve created work. So it really is a choice, she concludes.

Its time finally to end this legacy of slavery. Its a disgrace to the country, Saru Jayaraman reasserts a view held by many.

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Working for $2.13 (114 pesos) an hour in the US - Dominican Today

A union representative for staff at one of the country's biggest bakery companies has accused their employer of "slavery", amid a bitter dispute over pay and working conditions.

Members of FIRST Union at George Weston Foods' bakeries in thuhu and Wiri have been taking industrial action, saying they're underpaid and working long hours. George Weston - part of multinational company Associated British Foods - says they've been offered pay increases that would take them above the living wage of $22.75 an hour, and further action will threaten Auckland's bread supply.

"They're using the pandemic as an opportunity to disrupt supply," George Weston general manager of baking Mark Bosomworth told Newshub on Friday. George Weston makes bread sold under the Tip Top, Brgen, Ploughmans, Big Ben, Golden and Bazaar brands.

"We've already offered all of the workers at our sites the living wage in year one - that's a 5 percent pay increase in year one, and a 3 percent pay increase in year two... it's astonishing They saw this offer of mediation this week and turned it down flatly."

Jared Abbott of FIRST Union told The AM Show earlier on Friday the union hadn't seen any offer with pay rises that generous.

"It's not true, and if it was then that would be great - we could probably have a quick resolution to this We have actually written to them and said, 'Can you please just send us the offer you're talking about on the radio? Because it's not what you've given to us.'"

Abbott said the offer they've seen would leave 20 percent of the staff still below the living wage. The company has rejected this, showing Newshub a chart which showed zero employees would be below the living wage after the first year of pay hikes.

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Union accuses bread supplier George Weston of 'slavery', but company says they turned down pay hikes - Newshub